I brewed this batch of mead at the beginning of January, and on today July 3rd I finally bottled it.
Brett siphoning mead
The first thing I noticed was the aroma. A definite strong alcohol smell with the wonderful esters of honey. The yeast looked very strange at the bottom of the carboy, like some undersea silt with strange jellyfish floating around the yellow liquid.
Mead in the carboy
Mead in the bucket
Once transferred to the bottling bucket I took the final gravity, which came out to be 1.015. Subtract that from my initial gravity of 1.106 gives us .091. Multiply by 105 and then again by 1.25 gives an alcohol by volume of 11.94%. Over 11%?!?! Holy cow, this ain’t beer, it’s liquor!
Final Gravity of the Mead
After tasting a sample, my hunches were confirmed. It had a light sweet honey type of start with a harsh hard alcohol burn for the finish. This will definitely need to sit for another 6 months before enjoying.
What amazed me the most about it was the color. It is an extremely light color and completely opaque. It looks really pretty in my clear glass bottle.
Mead in a clear bottle
Well, true believers, this batch will be ready to sample hopefully around Christmas.
On another note, I found a potential source of crud that may have gotten into my last few batches of beer. Although I soak my bottling bucket in bleach water after every use, I have failed to take the spigot off and thoroughly clean it. Tonight I finally did this. Another lesson learned. Always seem to be learning things the hard way.
1 comments
Having tasted several of these, there is a definite weirdness to them I’m not sure how to identify. I think it’s a combo of the yeast with some alcohol harshness with some possible bacteria. It starts out great but has a strange after taste. That after taste has mellowed over time, so here’s hoping that come January it will be mostly gone.